Open Repository is a service from BioMed Central for institutions and organizations to build and maintain repositories on their behalf. With over 5 years of experience of Open Access publishing, and having built a publishing platform which now runs more than one hundred online journals and databases, BioMed Central is the perfect partner to provide a professional, reliable and cost-effective repository solution for your community.

What does Open Repository offer?

Set up
BioMed Central will set up and install the entire repository quickly with proven, well-supported software. Open Repository is built on the standards-based Open Source technology platform: DSpace, which is in use at hundreds of institutions world-wide.

Personalization
Open Repository offers complete personalization options to provide a solution tailored to your community’s needs including unique URL, institutional logos and colour scheme. The service allows an institution to organise it’s content by ‘community’, so each department or site can have it’s own distinct sub-area within the repository. Administrators control which users have rights to add/edit/delete content within specific areas of the repository, and also which content is universally accessible.

Maintaining the service and ongoing support
BioMed Central provides hosting services, data backups, technical support, and guarantees ongoing customer support, whilst the institution retains complete administrative control over the repository.  Open repository’s guaranteed high-availability platform from BioMed Central ensures 24/7 reliability.

Document upload Updated with NEW functionality
Open Repository allows acceptance of a wide variety of publication types to be uploaded including articles, preprints, monographs, reports, movies and databases. The easy-to-use interface allows authors to upload their material quickly and easily. Open Repository provides a simplified submission process, with pre-filled submission forms and the ability to upload multiple files at the same time.

Document formatting
The service can convert proprietary file formats (e.g. Word/PowerPoint) into PDF (a more suitable format for digital preservation). Metadata on all articles hosted in the repository is made available via the OAI (Open Archive Initiative) protocol, which ensures interoperability with other institutional repositories, and that the content can be found and harvested by Google, OAIster and other search engines.

Populating the repository
Data feeds can be set up to automatically populate the repository with newly published Open Access articles from your institution (e.g. BioMed Central, Public Library of Science). Our customer support team can provide material to assist with educating users on the benefits of archiving in their institutional repository.

Sophisticated search functionality
Open Repository will include advanced search functionality allowing users to search and find content quickly and efficiently. Users can search by department, subject area, article type, date published and author.

Abstract and full text download statistics NEW
Download statistics for document abstracts and full text are available to view in the repository.  Community and collection statistics are also available.  Administrators are able to view full online usage statistics through their administration interface.

"MySpace" - personal workspaces NEW
Individuals depositing material in their repository can create their own personal workspace to present their personal scholarly output held within the repository and link to other relevant information such as further areas of interest or contact details.

External article linking NEW
Open Repository allows users to create automatic links from individual items (documents) to a variety of relevant databases (e.g. bibliographic databases) or journal publisher sites if required.

Web accessibility compliance NEW
Open Repository is W3C Web Accessibility Initiative level A compliant.

Customer service and support
BioMed Central’s experienced team provide training and support to administrators who will manage an institution’s repository. Our customer support team can help administrators to answer queries from their users. The customer support team will ensure that any technical issues that arise are promptly addressed.

How does Open Repository compare with Digital Commons?

Open Repository shares many of the same features provided by Digital Commons and in addition provides additional features and functionalities unique to the Open Repository service.